Use of electronic commerce (ecommerce) systems is ubiquitous. Shopping over one or more web based systems connected to users through the Internet or other wide area network (WAN) or local area network (LAN) platform is performed by people all over the world, every day. Almost all of these systems rely on catalog style presentation of goods/services which are added to an electronic shopping cart which the user will later confirm and checkout by applying one or more payment methods and providing shipping information for the receipt of their goods/services.
These shopping carts invariably list the items selected by the users in a linear two dimensional manner. In the most common embodiments, the shopping carts provide for a single item per line, potentially with information describing or graphically representing the item along with one or more other pieces of information, such as quantity, size, color and price. Each additional item is added as a new line to the shopping cart.
While these shopping carts, as currently implemented, provide a simple solution to ecommerce checkout processing, they are not always ideal and not always the most intuitive solution for every shopper's needs. For instance, when placing an order for a large group (e.g., a high school athletic division), single line entries may end up taking up several pages or screens to display. Checking entries for correctness in this manner can be difficult. This can be further complicated if the delivery addresses (e.g., different buildings) and shipping times (e.g., for various sports seasons) is different for groups of items contained in the order.
Therefore, there is need in the art for a ecommerce shopping cart system and method that provides easy and intuitive viewing of items to be ordered by a user. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.